In a few days, Kubernetes will turn 10 years old! That’s an amazing milestone that we, at groundcover, would like to celebrate. You see, as the first inCloud, Kubernetes-native and eBPF-powered observability solution, the tweenaged orchestration platform has played a central role in our early childhood. So we tried to come up with a legendary gift for a legendary technology. We came up with a mixtape of the most famous songs that you never knew were originally written about Kubernetes.

Read all about it in this article, and listen to the full playlist here.

If we forgot any, let us know in the comments so we can add them to the playlist!

Here we go...

1. The Beatles - kubelet It Be

Very few know that the original opening lines of this all-time classic were:
“When I find myself in times of troubleshooting, Docker registry comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom, kubelet it be”

2. Ray Charles - Hit the Node, Jack

Did you know that Jack actually stands for “Just Another Connection on Kubernetes”, which made more sense before the unfortunate change in title.

3. Fugees - OOMKilling Me Softly

So ahead of its time, this song originally predicted one of the most common issues you’ll face in a Kubernetes cluster, with the original lyrics going “I heard he drained a good pod, I heard he had to stop”.

4. The Beach Boys - Pod Only Knows

As a tribute to dolphins, the group’s favorite animal and symbol of the ocean which they loved so much, the Beach Boys dedicated an entire song to them with “Pod only knows”, referring to what you call a group of dolphins, while also future-proofing their song by referring to Kubernetes Pods, which are groups of containers.

5. The Rolling Stones - Taint It, Black

Not many know this, but the line “I see the girls walk by, dressed in their summer clothes, I have to turn my head until my darkness goes”, is a metaphor for Taints, as in nodes repelling pods.

6. Joe Cocker - With a Little Helm from my Friends

This song was going to pay tribute to Helm fans around the globe at the time.

7. Eagles - OTel California

Referring to the Linux Foundation headquarters in San Francisco, CA, this song is forever the unknown anthem of OpenTelemetry. We were this close to singing “Welcome to the OTel California, such a lovely trace”.

8. Nelly Furtado - Prometheus

As a highly flexible, open-source tool that accepts many query languages and integrations, Prometheus is indeed perceived as promiscuous, in the sense that it has an indiscriminate or unselective approach. The song writing process later took a left turn to appeal to a wider audience, focusing on the other meaning of that word.

9. Lee Ritenour - Istio

Just listen carefully to every word in this song and tell me it isn’t about a microservice longing to be connected to other microservices sharing the same environment, using the open source service mesh that does precisely that. Why people think this is a love song is unclear to this day.

10. The Offspring - Why Don’t You Get a CronJob

What started off as a good piece of advice from a team leader trying to help a teammate become more efficient, quickly became an angry song after the team leader went through an ugly breakup.

11. Ray Parker Jr. - GhostClusters

Ever tried looking for a cluster in your monitoring tool and it just disappeared? (probably not if you’re using groundcover, wink) Well, that's what this song was going to be about.

12. Imagine Dragons - Daemons

While both Daemons and Demons are pronounced the same and share the same etymology, this was simply a typo by the record designer, who happened to also juggle a part-time job as a Linux developer.

13. M|A|R|R|S - Pump Up the Persistent Volume

When the decision was made to make this song about humans needing each other’s energy to dance and party, it unfortunately lost its initial charm of depicting the interaction between a PVC and PVs. Sounds of a PVC searching for a PV it can call home were translated to human language and became “Brothers and sisters, pump up the volume, we're gonna need you, brothers and sisters”.

14. Naughty by Nature - Hip HPA Hooray

Clearly the intention was for this to be a song celebrating the hip, native Kubernetes feature that allows automatic horizontal scaling (hooray!). It all changed when Hip Hop became widely popular, and the focus of the celebration shifted.

15. Beach Boys - kubectl Up

Following another all-nighter, at 5:29 AM, when the developers behind kubectl successfully went live with the Kubernetes command line tool, they texted two words to the wider team - “kubectl up”. The Beach Boys immediately offered to write a song celebrating their effort, but the team declined, fearing to become overnight sensations. The band did, however, leave a subtle gesture of acknowledgement, making the track exactly 5:29 mins long.

Check out the full playlist on Spotify for these 15 songs + these 3 bonus tracks:

BONUS TRACK #1: Destiny’s Child - Say My Namespace

BONUS TRACK #2: Nina Simone - I Put a Spec on You

BONUS TRACK #3: Amy Winehouse - RBAC to Black

Clearly, none of these anecdotes should be taken seriously. But if you’d like to get serious about minimizing your observability costs while maximizing your monitoring scale and granularity - to quote the classic GhostClusters track -
“Who you gonna call? groundcover!”